Some of you live where hard tops are useful, down here it's like an Easy Bake oven so when I bought my 2nd 3a it had a pitiful aluminum top and only decent thing was the latches. One didn't work and the other just barely did so I decided to see what it would take to fix them. Here is interior and it's easy to get apart just look for and drill out the spot welds.
The flat spring was broken and that would be typical of wear/water and rust over time.
After cleaning everything a coil spring would be better so I got a steel rivet from Ace Hardware and drilled a hole in body and up into the latch.
I thought 2 springs would give more force than 1 but it doesn't work that way so disregard the pic but remember 1 spring goes over the rivet shaft and this keeps spring from kicking out. You have to play with length to allow it to compress yet push the latch up enough. I got the springs from Ace also
Here is the body reassembled and a coat of Ospho on it. I didn't take it to bare metal as I was going to sell it and let buyer decide what to do.
You can see where I migged the rivet head and ground it flush and also where the 2 holes that the spot welds were drilled out are and they were welded closed
All done and I put some powdered graphite inside to slick it up and it works like a champ
Polished the chrome and except for the bolts/nuts for attachment to the top it's done
Not sure what my top was but company that made the latches is in Chicago and still in business and a couple people said they looked like same latches on Sears tops. I imagine it was a generic latch. Probably about 4 bucks in parts
